HOW DO YOU HANDLE LANGUAGES IN BLADES?

HOW DO YOU HANDLE LANGUAGES IN BLADES?

HOW DO YOU HANDLE LANGUAGES IN BLADES?

Probably because they’re allying with the unionizing Citizens of Coalridge, who I described as being largely Skovlanders, one of my players decided he wanted to start a clock to learn Skov.

Rasal’s an Iruvian noble, fresh off the boat, and we liked the idea that he’d want to learn their language, but I hadn’t really planned on making languages a meaningful part of our story.

We agreed that it should be a 6-part clock, at the end of which he would be fluent (Consort), but after 4 segments of which he would already be able to read and write Skov (Study).

Again, I like the idea… but it creates a problem : I can either start penalizing others for not knowing a language, or give him some sort of advantage when dealing with Skovlanders.

I prefer the second solution, I might give him a new ability “Friend of the Skov” which gives him potency when dealing with Skov and Skovlanders, but I was wondering what you thought.

The Prestige in Play

The Prestige in Play

The Prestige in Play

We played our first session of a new Blades in the Dark games last night : following a crew of Shadows calling themselves The Phantom Assembly, essentially commissioned by the Circle of Flames to perform a series of jobs after the Wraith failed to get the job done.

In return for a safe place to call home in the Old Rail Yard, the crew helped Belle Brogan by breaking into Master Slane’s offices to recover documents proving that disappearing Coalridge workers were in fact being shipped off to parts unknown (supposedly a Strangford Workhouse) against their will.

The Phantom Assembly is made up of :

Rasal Sahm, a daring Iruvian Lurk

Vey, an Akorosi orphan Artificer

Targos, an ex-military Tycherosi Hound

Chey, an Akorosi servant-turned-Illusionist

It was for Chey that I originally created the Prestige Playbook, and Catherine created a neat background for her : The servant of an abusive occultist who subjected her to increasingly terrifying experiments until she eventually made a bargain with one of her master’s devils to get rid of him.

She’s terrified that he’ll come back, so her Vice is an Obligation to keep working for him despite his absence : she takes care of his house, continues his experiments, maintains his affairs, etc.

Catherine picked the Ghost Dreams as her starting ability and used it a couple of times during the Score. Once to distract some dogs so that the crew could sneak past the guards unnoticed, and once to distract the guards while they broke a window to make their getaway.

She rolled Sway in both cases, although in retrospect it should possibly have been Wreck, and both rolls were abject failures (to be honest, I kind of wish that I had simply hand-waved those rolls).

All in all, I quite like the general gist of the playbook, but it needs a little work to better fit into Blades in the Dark :

I might need to rethink exactly what the player rolls when using Ghost Dreams. My logic so far was essentially that you roll as if you were doing it yourself, the ability simply lets you do it without making your presence known.

I need to work on the Xp trigger. As it stands, it’s pointlessly ambiguous and resulted in a round of puzzled looks when we went through Xp.

In general, the game itself was a mixed bag :

* Rasal fell in love with leading group actions and used it to excellent effect several times. Aaron’s probably the most comfortable with the rules and the general concept (and was also the only one to suggest betraying Belle).

* Vey did a fair bit of lock-picking and was instrumental in a couple of flashbacks to create distractions, but generally spent the session getting her bearings. She decided to define her gadget later.

* Targos was spoiling for a fight but never quite got one, and made a glorious job of Commanding his way past a couple of security guards when he caught their attention while casing the factory area.

These guys hadn’t played Blades before, and struggled quite a bit with the concept of risk, Stress and Consequences : they were quite shy about taking on Stress, which led to them powering through consequences rather than resisting them, which meant I was a little careful about how hard I hit them.

They seemed to get it when we went through experience and vices etc. at the end, so I’m hoping next time they’ll feel more comfortable about diving into danger and playing to their character 😉

All in all, a bit of an awkward start but it looks promising.

#ArtistPlaybook

Art and Artists in Blades In The Dark

Art and Artists in Blades In The Dark

Art and Artists in Blades In The Dark

Alright, the more I fiddle around with this “Illusionist” playbook, the more I’m veering away from Houdini and towards the idea of a mad artist capable of making their visions manifest.

To be honest, I quite like the idea of creating a playbook that captures the love of Art in the Dishonored series to let players create the Sokolovs and Delilahs of Doskvol.

So my question is : How would you handle artists, art and the creation of art in Blades In The Dark?

Part of the reason I’m asking is that I created a Special Ability called Palimpsest which may well define something which should normally be possible already.

#ArtistPlaybook

Alright, riddle me this :

Alright, riddle me this :

Alright, riddle me this :

One of my players wanted to play an illusionist in Duskwall.

My gut reaction was that there isn’t really such a thing in the world of Blades in the Dark as far as I can tell, so I suggested that she could play a Spider and create her illusions through the power of Flashbacks à la [Now You See Me](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_You_See_Me_(film))

We agreed on that method, but I can tell that her heart wasn’t really in it, so I’m wondering how you folks would recommend we handle illusion magic in the world of Blades In The Dark?

Thoughts?

(Art is “Pathfinder – Illusionist” by Mark Molnar)

Actual Play Prep : Ex-Legionnaires in Tropical Duskwall

Actual Play Prep : Ex-Legionnaires in Tropical Duskwall

Actual Play Prep : Ex-Legionnaires in Tropical Duskwall

I have the suspicion that we’re going to revert to not-so-tropical Duskwall, since I’m getting a sense of cold feet from my players, but here is a collated description of Ashamoil from KJBishop’s The Etched City in case it might interest anyone else to look into it :

It’s a decadent, corrupt city-state in the heart of the jungle, with 19th century technology and a colonial twist.

Built along a straight stretch of deep, slow river running east and west through granite hills towards the sea, it fills some twenty miles of jungle almost exactly halfway between the mountains and an immense cataract.

Its architecture is a cross between gothic victorian and indian architecture climbing in tiers of walled terraces up steep hillsides, with thousands of boats crowding the waters at the bottom and riverside houses with front stairs plunging right into the river.

In the hour after sunrise and sunset, the water along the quay fills with hungry saurians and at those times, small boats keep out to the middle of the river and carts stay away from the banks.

Seven bridges and the seven days of the week are named after seven traitors to the empire, their deeds erased from history so that only their names remained after their execution.

Three hours riding east along the river brings you to the verge of the city and a new extension of it, which in the short span of its existence has earned the name of Little Hell, where slaughteryards, tanneries, knackers and glue makers ply their trade.

The climate is hot, there’s jungle just outside the walls, and crocodiles swim up the river and eat you if you aren’t careful. People bring in pythons to clean up beetles. Most of the characters are dark-skinned, and a northerner’s pallor marks him as a foreigner.

An endless war among small nation in the wild territories along the river, not far from the city, keep a steady supply of defeated and captured people coming into the city’s slave markets.

It has slums. It has lower-class characters. It has dangerous, nasty gangs. It has factories powered by child labor. It has slavery and opposition to slavery. It has crime lords fighting things out with guns, swords, and cavalry charges. It has blood and guts and sex and death.

Actual Play Intro : Ex-Legionnaires in Tropical Duskwall

Actual Play Intro : Ex-Legionnaires in Tropical Duskwall

Actual Play Intro : Ex-Legionnaires in Tropical Duskwall

They don’t have a name yet, which I think makes a lot of sense, they’re new to this business, after all.

They know each other though, they fought together, they trusted each other, back when things were simple.

There was a mission, a few weeks or months or years back, a run-of-the-mill extraction job in the Dagger Isles.

Everything went pretty smoothly, but that’s when things started to turn sour, when people started turning up dead.

They saw something, or took something, or someone thought they did, something worth killing over.

Hix got drummed out of the fleet when her father fell from grace, so she slid back up into her ivory towers before the killing started.

Needles had that misunderstanding over the appropriate purveyance of narcotics, and sank into the muck with the leeches.

Mist, she turned up “dead” in the massacre of her unit, slipped some other poor blood in her uniform and lurked into the night.

But Crow… ah, some poor bastards are still hunting that old dog, and all the dark gods have mercy on their souls when they find him.

And they all found themselves back here, with pockets full of holes and broken promises, just aching to make a name for themselves…

…and me with a barge full of imperial wheel-locks and not a soul alive in this city desperate enough to try to shift them for me.

What’s an honest smuggler to do, I ask you?

– Hoxley, Imperial Quartermaster

Actual Play Prep : Ex-Legionnaires in Tropical Duskwall

Actual Play Prep : Ex-Legionnaires in Tropical Duskwall

Actual Play Prep : Ex-Legionnaires in Tropical Duskwall

At long last, with different players, in a different city, I’m finally going to run a game of Blades in the Dark.

As per long-standing tradition, I give Players the opportunity to tell me “Three True Things” about the world – this is basically their opportunity to add or remove elements they like or don’t.

After much debate, they decided on these :

– There is a high society, nobles are exotic “other” people whose lives are mysteriously, decadently different from ours

– There are airships, though they are largely the purview of nobles and the military, and the skies are as dangerous as the seas

– The game takes place in a tropical city, more like a cross between Karnaca, Camorr and Ashamoil,* and the weather matters

From this I noted a few more details :

– There are terrible, horrible, not good, very bad things living in the wilds, the waters and the skies. Among them, the leviathan

– Mermaids came up often enough in player conversation that they should probably come up in play… more like Lovecraft’s Deep Ones and fairytale Nymphs and Sirens (see terrible, horrible, etc.)

– Lots of other things that were quite clear from the start, but player conversation emphasized one way or the other

So I was wondering what people thought :

– Should I set the game in an altered Duskwall, or set it somewhere else in the world (John Harper​​, is there a city that might fit?) and what would be the implications of it all?

– Any thoughts or recommendations for running a group of ex-legionnaires turned arms dealers? What problems might they encounter? What advantages might they have?

– What do you think of the fact their current goal is to become something between the A-Team and Leverage, which sets them up to cover the same patch as The Lost?

As an aside, they’re building an ex-military group who somehow fell out of favor and are hawking stolen military weapons while they figure out what they did wrong and why people are trying to kill them… but the impression I get is that they’re looking to be something like The Lost

*from Dishonored 2, The Lies of Locke Lamora and The Etched City respectively

It’s not strictly speaking art, but it just seemed to scream Whisper and I figured someone else might appreciate it.

It’s not strictly speaking art, but it just seemed to scream Whisper and I figured someone else might appreciate it.

It’s not strictly speaking art, but it just seemed to scream Whisper and I figured someone else might appreciate it… “Art” felt closest to a “Resources” channel

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com.es/2015/10/occult-infrastructure-and-funerary.html

Alright, I’m going to start a game of Blades in the Dark with my players next week.

Alright, I’m going to start a game of Blades in the Dark with my players next week.

Alright, I’m going to start a game of Blades in the Dark with my players next week.

They’ve been desperately running from horrific things beyond the ken of mortal minds for long enough, it’s time to run from likely lads with filthy blades,

I have the backer rules (though I got the impression from John Harper’s latest AP episode that a rules update might be coming up) and I’ve been looking through the links here.

Is there anything else I should be aware of? Especially re: rules & setting that I might have missed.

I generally get the sense a lot of the setting is implied rather that exposed at the moment, which means I’ll be stealing from :

Thief

Dishonoured

the Dark Volumes

the Gentleman Bastards

the Tristopolis novels

Freedomâ„¢

the Shadow Line

the Wire

the Black Donnellys

Etherscope

A/State

Chaositech (Hauntech)

d20 Moden Cyberspace (Necrotic Implants)